philosophies, of the solid literature which discourses on life, and the imaginative literature which attempts to pourtray it.

It were idle to reason how the thing has come about; but, undeniably, the modern novel is one of the most important moral agents of the community. The essayist may write for his hundreds ; the preacher preach to his thousands; but the novelist counts his audience by millions. His power is threefold-over heart, reason, and fancy. The orator we hear eagerly, but as his voice fades from us its lessons depart : the moral philosopher we read and digest, by degrees, in a serious, ponderous way: but the really good writer of fiction takes us altogether by storm. Young and old, grave and gay, learned or imaginative, who of us is safe from his influence? He creeps innocently on our family-table in the shapes of those three well-thumbed library volumes sits for days after, invisibly at our fireside, a provocative of incessant discussion slowly but surely, either by admiration or aversion, his opinions, ideas, feelings, impress themselves upon us, which impression remains long after we have come to that age, if we ever reach it, which all good angels forbid! when we "don't read novels."

For

The amount of new thoughts scattered broadcast over society within one month of the appearance of a really popular novel, the innumerable discussions it creates, and the general influence which it exercises in the public mind, form one of the most remarkable facts of our day. the novelist has ceased to be a mere story-teller or romancist. He-we use the superior pronoun in a general sense, even as an author should be dealt with as a neutral being, to be judged solely by "its" work,-he buckles to his task in solemn earnest. For what is it to "write a novel?" Something which the multitude of young contributors to magazines, or young people who happen to have nothing to do but weave stories, little dream of. If they did, how they would shrink from the awfulness of what they have taken into their innocent, foolish

dous web of human life, so wonderful in its pattern, so mysterious in its convolutions, and of which-most solemn thought of all-warp, woof and loom, are in the hands of the Maker of the universe alone.

Yet this the true novel-writer essays to do; and he has a right to do it. He is justified in weaving his imaginary web side by side with that which he sees perpetually and invisibly woven around him, of which he has deeply studied the apparent plan, so as to see the under threads that guide the pattern, keener perhaps than other men. He has learned to deduce motives from actions, and to evolve actions from motives: he has seen that from certain characters (and in a less degree certain circumstances) such and such results, which appear accidental, become in reality as inevitable as the laws which govern the world. Laws physical and moral, with which no Deus ex machiná can interfere, else the whole working of the universe would be disturbed.

Enough has been said, we trust, to indicate the serious position held by what used to be thought "a mere writer of fiction." Fiction forsooth! It is at the core of all the truths of this world; for it is the truth of life itself. He who dares to reproduce it is a Prometheus who has stolen celestial fire: let him beware that he uses it for the benefit of his fellow-mortals. Otherwise one can imagine no vulture fiercer than the remorse which would gnaw the heart of such a writer, on the clearvisioned mountain-top of life's ending, if he began to suspect he had written a book which would live after him to the irremediable injury of the world.

We do not refer to impure or immoral books. There can be but one opinion concerning them-away with them to the Gehenna from which they come. We speak of those works, blameless in plan and execution, yet which fall short -as great works only can-of the highest ideal: the moral ideal, for which, beyond any intellectual perfection, a great author ought to strive. For he is

His very power makes him the more dangerous. His uncertainties, however small, shake to their ruin hundreds of lesser minds, and

"When he falls, he falls like Lucifer, "Never to rise again."

If a mountebank at a fair mouths his antics of folly or foulness, we laugh, or pass by-he is but a mountebank: he can do little harm: but when a hierophant connives at a false miracle, or an eloquent, sincere apostle goes about preaching a bewildering lie, we shrink, we grieve, we tremble. By and by, we take courage openly to denounce, not the teacher but the teaching. "You are an earnest man-doubtless, a true man-but your doctrine is not true. We, who cannot speak, but only feelwe feel that it is not true. You are treading dangerous ground. You have raised a ghost you cannot lay, you have thrown down a city which you cannot rebuild. You are the very Prometheus, carrying the stolen fire. See that it does not slip from your unwary hands, and go blasting and devastating the world."

Thoughts somewhat like these must have passed through the mind of many a reader of a novel, the readers of which have been millions. Probably the whole history of fiction does not present an instance of two such remarkable books following one another within so short a time as "Adam Bede," and "The Mill on the Floss." All the world has read them; and though some may prefer one, and some the other, and, in a moral point of view, some may admire and some condemn-all the world grants their wonderful intellectual power, and is so familiar with the details of them that literary analysis becomes unnecessary.

Nor do we desire to attempt it. The question which these books, and especially the latter, have suggested, is quite a different thing. It is a question with which literary merit has nothing to do. Nor, in one sense, literary morality,-the external morality which, thank heaven,

and exacts, and here undoubtedly finds. Ours is more an appeal than a criticismi -an appeal which any one of an audience has a right to make, if he thinks he sees what the speaker, in the midst of all his eloquence, does not see—

"The little pitted speck in garnered fruit,

"That, rotting inward, slowly moulders all."

Of "The Mill on the Floss," in a literary point of view, there can be but one opinion-that, as a work of' art, it is as perfect as the novel can well be made: superior even to "Adam Bede." For the impression it gives of power, evenly cultivated and clear sighted, the power of creation, amalgamating real materials into a foreplanned ideal scheme; the power of selection, able to distinguish at once the fit and the unfit, choosing the one and rejecting the other, so as to make every part not only complete as to itself, but as to its relation with a wellbalanced whole-the "Mill on the Floss" is one of the finest imaginative works in our language. In its diction, too: how magnificently rolls on that noble Saxon English-terse and clear, yet infinitely harmonious, keeping in its most simple common-place flow a certain majesty and solemnity which reminds one involuntarily of the deep waters of the Floss. The fatal Floss, which runs through the whole story like a Greek fate or a Gothic destiny-ay, from the very second chapter, when

"Maggie, Maggie," continued the mother, in a tone of half-coaxing fretfulness, as this small mistake of nature entered the room, "where's the use o' my telling you to keep away from the water? You'll tumble in and be drownded some day, an' then you'll be sorry you didn't do as mother told you."

This is a mere chance specimen of the care over small things-the exquisite polish of each part, that yet never interferes with the breadth of the wholewhich marks this writer as one of the truest artists, in the highest sense, of

Another impression made strongly by the first work of "George Eliot," and repeated by "his" (we prefer to respect the pseudonym) second, is the earnestness, sincerity, and heart-nobility of the author. Though few books are freer from that morbid intrusion of self in which many writers of fiction indulge, no one can lay down "The Mill on the Floss" without a feeling of having held commune with a mind of rare individuality, with a judgment active and clear, and with a moral nature, conscientious, generous, religious, and pure. It is to 'this moral nature, this noblest half of all literary perfectness, in our author, as in all other authors, that we now make appeal.

"George Eliot," or any other conscientious novelist, needs not to be told that he who appropriates this strange phantasmagoria of human life, to repaint and re-arrange by the light of his own imagination, takes materials not his own, nor yet his reader's. He deals with mysteries which, in their entirety, belong alone to the Maker of the universe. By the force of his intellect, the quick sympathies of his heart, he may pierce into them a little way-farther, perhaps, than most people-but at best only a little way. He will be continually stopped by things he cannot understand -matters too hard for him, which make him feel, the more deeply and humbly as he grows more wise, how we are, at best,

"Like infants crying in the dark, "And with no language but a cry." If by his dimly-beheld, one-sided, fragmentary representations, which mimic untruly the great picture of life, this cry, either in his own voice, or in the involuntary utterance of his readers, rises into an accusation against God, how awful is his responsibility, how tremendous the evil that he may originate!

We doubt not, the author of the "Mill on the Floss" would shudder at the suspicion of this sort of involuntary blasphemy, and yet such is the tendency

A very simple story. A girl of remarkable gifts-mentally, physically, and morally; born, like thousands more, of parents far inferior to herself-struggles through a repressed childhood, a hopeless youth brought suddenly out of this darkness into the glow of a first passion for a man who, ignoble as he may be, is passionately in earnest with regard to her she is tempted to treachery, and sinks into a great error, her extrication out of which, without involving certain misery and certain wrong to most or all around her, is simply an impossibility. The author cuts the Gordian knot by creating a flood on the Floss, which wafts this poor child out of her troubles and difficulties into the other world.

Artistically speaking, this end is very fine. Towards it the tale has gradually climaxed. From such a childhood as that of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, nothing could have come but the youth Tom and the girl Maggie, as we find them throughout that marvellous third volume changed indeed, but still keeping the childish images of little Tom and little Maggie, of Dorlcote Mill. Ay, even to the hour, when with that sense of the terrible exalted into the sublime, which only genius can make us feel-we see them go down to the deeps of the Floss "in an embrace never to be parted: "living through again, in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and "roamed through the daisied fields to"gether."

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So far as exquisite literary skill, informed and vivified by the highest order of imaginative power, can go, this story is perfect. But take it from another point of view. Ask, what good will it do-whether it will lighten any burdened heart, help any perplexed spirit, comfort the sorrowful, succour the tempted, or bring back the erring into the way of peace; and what is the answer? Silence.

Let us reconsider the story, not artistically, but morally.

Here is a human being, placed during her whole brief life-her hapless nine

of temptation never conquered, or just so far that we see its worst struggle as but beginning; of sorrows which teach nothing, or teach only bitterness; of love in its most delicious, most deadly phase; love blind, selfish, paramount, seeing no future but possession, and, that hope gone, no alternative but death -death, welcomed as the solution of all difficulties, the escape from all pain?

Is this right? Is it a creed worthy of an author who has pre-eminently what all novelists should have," the brain of a man and the heart of a woman," united with what we may call a sexless intelligence, clear and calm, able to observe, and reason, and guide mortal passions, as those may, who have come out of the turmoil of the flesh into the region of ministering spirits, “ αγγελοι,” messengers between God and man? What if the messenger testify falsely? What if the celestial trumpet give forth an uncertain sound?

Yet let us be just. There are those who argue that this perhaps the finest ending, artistically, of any modern novel, is equally fine in a moral sense: that the death of Maggie and Tom is a glorious Euthanasia, showing that when even at the eleventh hour, temptation is conquered, error atoned, and love reconciled, the life is complete; its lesson has been learnt, its work done; there is nothing more needed but the vade in pacem to an immediate heaven. This, if the author so meant it, was an idea grand, noble, Christian: as Christian (be it said with reverence) as the doctrine preached by the Divine Pardoner of all sinners to the sinner beside whom He died-"To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise." But the conception ought to have been worked out so plainly that no reader could mistake it. We should not have been left to feel, as we do feel, undecided whether this death was a translation or an escape: whether if they had not died, Maggie would not have been again the same Maggie, always sinning and always repenting; and Tom the same Tom, hard and narrow-minded, though the least

gloomy life, might have softened and made a thoroughly good man of him. The author ought to have satisfied us entirely as to the radical change in both; else we fall back upon the same dreary creed of overpowering circumstances : of human beings struggling for ever in a great quagmire of unconquerable temptations, inevitable and hopeless woe. A creed more fatal to every noble effort, and brave self-restraintabove all to that humble faith in the superior Will which alone should govern ours can hardly be conceived. It is true that there occur sometimes in life positions so complex and overwhelming, that plain right and wrong become confused; until the most righteous and religious man is hardly able to judge clearly or act fairly. But to meet such positions is one thing, to invent them is another. It becomes a serious question whether any author-who, great as his genius may be, sees no farther than mortal intelligence can-is justified in leading his readers into a labyrinth, the way out of which he does not, first, see clearly himself, and next, is able to make clear to them, so as to leave them mentally and morally at rest, free from all perplexity and uncertainty.

Now, uncertainty is the prevailing impression with which we close "the Mill on the Floss." We are never quite satisfied in our detestation of the Dodson family, the more odious because so dreadfully natural that we feel we all are haunted by some of the race, could name them among our own connections, perhaps have even received, kindnesses from a Mrs. Pullet, a Mrs. Glegg, or a Mrs. Tulliver. We are vexed with ourselves for being so angry with stern, honest, upright, business-like Tom-so contemptuously indifferent to gentle unsuspicious Lucy, with her universal kindness, extending from "the more "familiar rodents" to her silly aunt Tulliver. We question much whether such a generous girl as Maggie would have fallen in love with Stephen at all; whether she would not from the first have regarded him simply as her cousin's